1637_The Volga Rules Read online

  What was surprising was that one of the shots was close enough for Vadim to see the wood chips from where it hit a log. Ducking behind his cover, Vadim reloaded quickly and then laid his AK3 on the log and took careful aim. The fancy coat had managed to reload his pistol faster than he’d been able to reload his AK3 and there was another fusillade of shots. Then Vadim fired again, and the man went down.

  That caused consternation in the enemy’s ranks, and they started peeling away and running back toward the boat.

  Ivan Maslov watched the battle from the hilltop till the enemy broke, then he realized he hadn’t given any instructions for what to do if they won. Ivan ran for a horse, any horse he could find. He needed to get down there now and avoid a blood bath. Besides, he wanted that boat. He wanted those guns. Especially the cannon.

  As it happened, he needn’t have worried. Sergei and Vadim had been happy enough to take the enemy’s surrender, even patching up Petr Ivanovich Chaplygin, who apparently Vadim had shot in the left leg. Vadim insisted that it was intentional, but Ivan didn’t believe it. He also didn’t publicly question it. In fact, he was fulsome in his praise for everyone from Alexis who had been in charge of placing the mines through Sergei and Vadim and the troops. The first battle of Ivan’s first command had been a victory, and nothing breeds esprit de corps like victory.

  Now if they could only survive long enough to get some sort of armaments.

  The next evening

  The cannon from the steamboat were still being hauled up Kruglaya Mountain. They were good guns, if light. Rifled breech-loaders that would reach across the river. And once they got the ones from the sunken steamboats they would have eight.

  Petr Ivanovich Chaplygin was drinking copious amounts of vodka as anesthetic for his leg. The bullet had apparently chipped his thigh bone and the surgeon had been busy for a couple of hours, cutting him up and sewing him back together.

  “General Birkin has an army of fifty thousand men,” Chaplygin said, sounding both belligerent and aggrieved to Ivan. “You won’t stop him with your fancy tricks.”

  “I don’t expect to stop him,” Ivan offered calmly. Chaplygin had been one of those officers who despised the academy and the baker’s boy. Ivan knew him and didn’t like him at all, but the more important issue was getting some intelligence. Ivan needed to know what the enemy had in mind. To do that he needed to engage Chaplygin in conversation.

  “Even so, Ivan, I wonder if we have enough men,” Alexander Volkov said. “Sure, this is a great position. I know that, you know that. Ivan the Terrible knew it when he put the fort here. But the best fort has to have people manning it.”

  “’At’s right,” Chaplygin slurred. “And peasants won’t do it, not like Vadim here. I put a dozen shots into the tree he was behind and he kept calm and shot me in the leg. Lazy peasant wouldn’t do that. Buggers would run as soon as the wood chips started flying!”

  Ivan hastily waved Alexander down before he could correct Chaplygin on the courage of peasants when they were armed and defending their own.

  Alexander raised an eyebrow, but subsided and sipped at his vodka. Luckily, Chaplygin had been too absorbed in his declaration to notice.

  “Perhaps. But we are getting more warriors coming to our side every day.” He waved at Alexander.

  “What got into you, Alexander? I thought you had better sense than to go over to the revolutionaries.”

  “It’s the czar, Petr,” Alexander said. “How can it be treason to serve the czar?” Alexander, Ivan knew, was a friend of Petr Chaplygin. They had lived in Moscow, serving together, the young men of the royal court.

  “Hah! Mikhail is a nothing. Weather vane turning with the lightest breeze. It’s the boyars and the great families that matter. And us, the deti boyars and the dvorianes who run the empire. That’s what you are. A traitor to your class.”

  “And how is Sheremetev treating the deti boyars and the dvorianes? Like we are peasants, that’s how,” Alexander shot back.

  “Gentlemen, let it pass,” Ivan said, and Petr Chaplygin sneered at the upstart baker’s boy promoted above his station. Ivan found it hard to let that pass, harder than it had been when he was back in the Moscow Kremlin. But he kept his mouth shut, by remembering that his side had won. “As to your comment about General Birkin, we have more men every day and the differences in range and rate of fire of the new weapons means that the balance of force has shifted in the direction of the defender.”

  “You and your war games.” Chaplygin snorted. “Little cardboard cutouts aren’t men, and calculations aren’t battles. Battles are won by courage and willingness to get in close and rip out your enemy’s guts. Birkin will go right around you. And what will you do then? I’ll tell you what you’ll do. You’ll sit on your hill and lose, or you’ll come out of your fort and be slaughtered by real men.”

  “And how will General Birkin supply his army with us sitting on his supply route?” Ivan asked, letting some of his irritation show.

  “He’ll draft peasants and have them carry the supplies. It’s all they’re good for.”

  Ivan couldn’t help it. He snorted a laugh of his own. “So he’s going to stop his boats upriver of us and carry his supplies by land three hundred miles. That’s going to take a lot of peasants and a lot of horses. And where is he going to get the wagons, carry them on the riverboats?”

  “Maybe,” Chaplygin insisted, sounding belligerently uncertain.

  “He might even be able to do it,” Alexander cut in. “But the time, Petr, the time.”

  Ivan Maslov listened with half an ear as the conversation continued. It was a race now. They had to get enough troops into Kazan and the top of Kruglaya Mountain to hold them and block the river. As long as they held the river, any progress that Birkin’s army made after that would be at a snail’s pace. They weren’t ready to do that yet, but if Birkin gave them a couple of months they would be. They would have a thousand men and more guarding the mountain, and ten times that in Kazan.

  General Ivan Vasilevich Birkin’s army was refitting in Nizhny Novgorod when they got the news of the loss of the steamboat flotilla. He didn’t curse, at least not much. He hadn’t had great hopes that the steamboats would take Kazan, but it had been a chance and it would have made his life easier. He looked at his cousin. “Well, that decides it. Unless we get orders to the contrary, we’ll wait here till hard winter, then proceed to Kazan. In the meantime, I want to turn Nizhny Novgorod into a supply base. I want all the food, shot and sundries needed to support an army of fifty thousand for four months in place here.”

  The war and the rest of the world were just going to have to wait.

  Goritsky Monastery

  October 1636

  “I don’t believe it. The riverboats didn’t even get to Kazan. They were stopped at Kruglaya Mountain,” Elena said.

  Several of the new arrivals chimed in. When husbands had been shot or even tonsured, their wives had been sent off to the nunnery. Goritsky Monastery probably held more women who had been married to boyars than any place outside Moscow. Some were widowed, some forcibly divorced, some had taken their divorce well. In two cases, even thankfully, but many were highly resentful of the Sheremetev government. And many if not all of them were political animals.

  The conversation quickly turned into an analysis of which great house was going to switch sides now that Czar Mikhail had proven much harder to handle than predicted.

  Sofia listened with half an ear. She was preoccupied with the mica industry just now. A great deal of the Gorchakov family wealth was tied into the delivery of Muscovy mica capacitors to the USE. And here she was, not very far at all from major mica mines. She looked over at Tatyana Dolmatov-Karpov. She was the widow of Lev Dolmatov-Karpov, who was an ally of Sofia’s family on the duma, and been executed in the weeks after Czar Mikhail escaped. Tatyana was the low end of the great houses, but her family was deeply involved in the mica mines.

  Hamburg, Germany

  October 163
6

  The hammer hit with a dull thud. It was a weighted wooden mallet and it drove the rod holding the paddle in place four inches. Two more blows knocked the paddle out and it landed on the floor. Guy Sayyeau grunted as he lifted the replacement paddle up to the tread and the hammer worked again, this time pounding the new paddle into place on the caterpillar tread. It was a big paddle, a yard tall and two yards wide. It took two men to manhandle it into place and a third to drive in the oak stays. Or to knock them loose. The chain and the sprocket wheels were working well.

  Captain John Adams had just about given up on his original design. The main issue was weight distribution. The Russian kochi were built more for ice traversing than ice breaking. They had a false keel to protect the ship during portage over ice floes. John had wanted to run his caterpillar tracks in front of the ship to break up the ice, but testing had shown that the weight-forward design was going to cause a series of problems. On the other hand, if the caterpillar tracks were placed back—but not quite all the way back—then they would lift the bow. The bow, as it pushed up on the ice, would raise the front of the tracks so that they would be able to bite into the ice and push the boat still farther.

  “You really think we are going to have to do this much?” asked the man with the hammer, wiping sweat from his brow.

  “I don’t know. I know that we are going to have to make adjustments as we shift from in the water to on the ice.”

  “We always had to do that.” Which was true enough. The kochi were constantly dragged up out of the water, then across an ice floe into the next stretch of water. In fact, the steam winches would make that easier. Which was essential, because this ship would be more than twice the size of the largest kochi John had ever seen.

  Meanwhile the hull of the “fluyt and a half,” Brent Partow’s nickname for the oversized fluyt-style sailing ships, had been modified so that below the waterline it was much more like an uptime icebreaker’s hull shape. And reinforced with heavy oak. The ship was coming along fine and the steam engine was being custom built by a shop in Magdeburg, while the chains were being built here in Hamburg. The chains were modified heavy roller chains, the sort used on motorcycles up-time, only much larger. There were two sets of chains, the drive chain that would transmit the power from the drive shaft down to the caterpillar tracks, and the caterpillar tracks themselves, which were actually only triple-wide roller chains with attachments on which a variety of treads could be placed. The treads could be spikes for a grip on ice, or even to rip up ice if it was weak enough, or paddles to push the boat through the water like a paddle wheel, but considerably lighter for the thrust delivered.

  In testing, the system had worked moderately well and caused some modification in how the paddle-treads were made, and also a decrease in the number of paddles on the treads. It turned out that extra paddles gave diminishing returns once they got too close together. The other thing that had changed was the shape of the paddles. They had started out as simple flat panels. Now they were T-shaped with supports, so that the water pressure didn’t push them flat or break them off.

  Still, John had no illusions about how well those paddles would stand up to mud or ice, which was why they were detachable and why they would be taking lots of extras in the cargo.

  Different parts of this ship were being built by different companies, even in different towns, so that they didn’t have to wait on one part to be finished before starting on the next. It was going to save them time, but it was still not likely that the whole ship would be ready before January at the earliest.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Boyars of Ufa

  Ufa

  October 1636

  Timofei Fedorovich Buturlin looked out at the sprawl that was Ufa and wondered why he had spent the last week on a horse to get here. And he wondered, especially, why he had brought his frigging army with him. He was the pismenny golova for Saratov and actually ran the Streltzi. When Czar Mikhail escaped and the news reached them, Timofei dithered till he got word from a cousin that Director-General Sheremetev had purged several boyars. Two killed and four sent to monasteries.

  Then he decided that he preferred Mikhail Romanov to Fedor Sheremetev. So he arranged a mass defection and even hired a thousand Cossacks to accompany them, and set out marching to Ufa. Now he was wondering if he had made a mistake.

  Three days later

  Bernie and Natasha sat down to a private dinner. Bernie smiled and showed her a rare bottle of wine shipped—actually, smuggled—from France through western Russia.

  Natasha smiled at Bernie’s antics in showing her the label.

  “Does Her Highness wish to try the…”

  The door burst open and Timofei Fedorovich Buturlin stormed in. “You have to talk to Czar Mikhail!”

  Natasha felt her face congeal. Every time. Every single time. She turned a cold eye to the latest addition to Czar Mikhail’s court in exile. “I will certainly speak to His Majesty. I do so regularly. I am not at all sure you will like what I have to say.”

  “You have to get him to issue directives on taxing the Volga trade.” Buturlin had apparently not listened. “The regulations are—”

  He continued, but Natasha listened with only half an ear. As it happened, she agreed with him for the most part. The regulations did indeed need reforming to decrease the opportunities for graft from the local administrators. Back before Sheremetev had taken over, Mikhail would have simply issued the imperial decree and the law would be changed. Of course, he would have had to get the permission of the duma and the Zemsky Sobor before issuing it because of the agreement he had signed when they made him czar. The new law would have then been administered, or not, by one of the bureaus.

  “No. We need a legislature,” Bernie said. “Rule by decree will end up with a mishmash of laws that…”

  Bernie was quoting Filip Pavlovich Tupikov. What Bernie had known of democratic government before he got to Russia could have been written on a postage stamp. Natasha wasn’t convinced that Filip and Bernie were right on this one. Sure, in the long run, that was the sort of government that they wanted to set up. But they were in no position to elect a chamber of legislators to enact laws. It seemed the wrong approach in the middle of a civil war. Natasha looked at the wine that Bernie had set unceremoniously on the table when he started arguing with Timofei Buturlin and sighed. Then she went back to work as a diplomat, smoothing ruffled feathers.

  Timofei had been made commander of the Ufa garrison because of the troops he had brought. Then the Cossacks had been detached from his command and sent to support General Tim in Kazan. The Streltzi were busy setting up businesses in Ufa and adding to its industrial base. Russia was coming apart, but not totally. The serfs were running, yes. But while there had been some atrocities as they ran, most of them were too busy running to stop for retribution. Cossack clans were breaking away and choosing sides. General Shein in Siberia had declared independence, along with Archangelsk. The situation was, at best, fluid. Natasha wished Colonel Nikita would get back.

  “They have the second dirigible up,” Nick told Czar Mikhail. “We saw it making a test flight.”

  Nick carefully didn’t call the dirigible by name, but Mikhail grimaced anyway. It was already all over Russia that the new dirigible was named Czar Alexis not Prince Alexis. Czar Alexis…It was a subtle move, declaring loyalty to the royal house, but at the same time declaring Czar Mikhail deposed. All without ever actually saying any of it in so many words.

  “What do we do about it?”

  “I talked with Tim and he wants to put rockets in every major city we control.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I hate it, Your Majesty,” Nick admitted with a grimace. He looked out the window to the uncompleted hangar where the Czarina Evdokia was tied down. “Mostly because the idea of what those rockets would do to our hydrogen cells terrifies me.”

  “I don’t like it either, Colonel, but we can’t let them control our skies. Wha
t about the Czarina Evdokia, though? If we use rockets, they can do the same.”

  “Yes. I will be staying higher. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we can do.”

  Moscow

  November 1636

  Director-General Sheremetev looked up at the sky and smiled. The Czar Alexis was circling Moscow to demonstrate that the government of Russia had its own dirigible. They didn’t need Bernie Zeppi to fly. “Get my horse.”

  Colonel Vasily Chaadaev helped the director-general into the airship’s gondola. It was fifteen feet above the ground and the older man was looking a little pale, no doubt from the climb.

  Fedor Sheremetev looked around, then turned to Colonel Chaadaev and asked, “How quickly can we get to Bor?”

  “Four hours, give or take, Director-General.”

  “Take us there, then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ten minutes into the flight, Fedor Sheremetev was regretting his impulsive order. The airship was so high that the land below looked like a detailed map. But Fedor knew it wasn’t. He knew perfectly well that were he to fall out one of the gondola windows, he would fall for a long time before he hit the ground. And nothing was holding them up but sacks full of gas. Yet he couldn’t retract his order. That would be too obvious. Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev was a strong-willed man. He had faced armies and he knew how to hide his feelings. In a voice that was firm—if not as firm as he would have preferred—he said, “Colonel, I have some work to do. Please find me a room, some paper and a pen.”

  For the next four hours, Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev endured constant gut-wrenching terror in a small, plain room with a table, chair, a steel-nibbed fountain pen and several sheets of blank paper. When, after an eternity, they reached Bor, Sheremetev rolled up the blank sheets and put them in his tunic. He stood and left the room, walked down the passage, and since the dirigible was docked in its hangar, he could walk down a ramp to a staircase.